As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the term “writing,” I read through Barbara Johnson’s essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are ten observations about the essay (Johnson’s main points).
- When you examine writing in the way Barbara Johnson done, you must use the very thing (i.e. writing) you are supposed to be interrogating.
- The 1960s revolution in writing had to do with language’s inability to represent reality. This was particularly true in literature, which for many had pretentiously become a substitute religion (or secular scripture).
- The most recent wave of critical interrogations of writing are indebted to Saussure who posited the arbitrary relationship between signifiers and signifieds. Both Marxism and psychoanalysis use this insight, though in different ways.
- Derrida’s key contribution to these interrogations was that writing reveals that presence in language is always a fiction.
- Writing is called upon to fix the very problem that writing causes.
- As a corollary insight, we learn that investigating writing is a way of investigating reading.
- Politically, this investigation has led to feminist and post-colonial insights: the way in which logocentrism keeps is implicitly male and Western.
- Perhaps most intriguingly, though, is the fact that Western culture HAS privileged writing in subjugating peoples (slavery; colonialism).
- Writing is a means of control, and that is why its investigation is crucial.
- Writing is all about authority.